Legal Access

Author: Benjamin FarrandIllustration: Davide Bonazzi

Whether you are building a website, looking for the right photo for your online newspaper or looking for the right sound for your remix, it is important to get permission, and more importantly, the right kind of permission to use media created by others. It does not matter whether you are dealing with a video clip, text, music, photos or computer icons, if you want to make sure your use is lawful, you need to have accessed that material legally.

Legal access needs to be considered when using all types of copyright materials, including those released under Creative Commons licences.

Legal access can be especially challenging when dealing with Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems. DRM are technical restrictions placed on digital media in order to protect a copyrighted work and to prevent any use of it the rightsholders have not authorised. Examples include the restriction that only allows you to share music you purchased on iTunes on five different devices, the code that prevents you from accessing The Times newspaper online without a subscription, or the code that prevents you from making a copy of a videogame. Although contentious and quite unpopular with general users, DRM continues to be used by many copyright owners. DRM systems are the result of the combination of licensing agreements, which state what you can or cannot do with the work, and Technological Protection Measures (TPMs), which technically prevent you from doing things not allowed by the licence. The important thing to remember about TPMs is that trying to get around, or ‘circumvent’ them is illegal. It does not matter whether what you are trying to do with DRM protected work is legal (or you think it is legal), the act of circumventing the protection in the first instance is illegal, as DRM technology itself is protected as a form of quasi-copyright. If you need to break DRM in order to use the copyrighted work in the way you want to, it is safe to say you do not have permission for that use. This is especially tricky when you benefit from a copyright exception, such as quotation or news reporting, but you cannot use the work because it is protected by TPMs. For example, you might want to criticise a film or to make a video news report, but the footage you want to use is technologically protected. In these cases, the law provides a procedure which should allow you to use the content, but this is so difficult that so far no one has followed it. Therefore, it is not clear how one should proceed in these circumstances.

Resources

It is important to note that some of the works available at the following links can be used only in certain countries.

Some examples of places to get works offered under copyright licences:

Getty Images UK: database of images, video clips and sound tracks available on different licences for different fees – http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/

WordPress: online blogging site that has a range of themes available for both free and for purchase, available on different licence terms – http://www.wordpress.com

Copyright Hub: the Copyright Hub aims to make licensing simpler and provides information about how you can get permission to use somebody else’s work, or how copyright relates to your own work – http://copyrighthub.co.uk/

Flickr: images, available under a range of various CC licences, however it also contains copyrighted images – http://www.flickr.com/

Incompetech: a collection of songs produced by the American artist Kevin MacLeod and distributed under a Creative Commons licence. You can freely use all the songs originally produced by Kevin MacLeod under the only condition of crediting the author – http://incompetech.com/

The electronic analysis of large amounts of copyright works allows researchers to discover patterns, trends and other useful information that cannot be detected through usual ‘human’ reading. This process, known as ‘text and data mining’…

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